A new ranking of the worst university workplaces for wellbeing is going to be developed after completion of a survey released by the UniSA Centre for Workplace Excellence in collaboration with the NTEU and a range of wellbeing organisations.
Uni SA Professor Maureen Dollard, who is leading the project said psychosocial safety had been a real issue in pockets of the higher education sector for decades.
Now that the Victorian Government has introduced laws requiring employers to make workplaces psychologically safe, in line with other jurisdictions across the country, it is an opportune time to launch the Australian University Census on Staff Wellbeing.
This is a really important step – HR issues within the sector have been chronically under-researched in the past and recent research found that HE staff reported higher risks than many other sectors, with 67% reporting psychologically unsafe working environments.
Just the first 12 questions of the survey will be used to develop the public ranking of universities, providing insights into how psychological health and wellbeing are being managed.
“By law the universities should be assessing the psychosocial safety risks on their own and trying to prevent exposures,” Professor Dollard said.
“The issue we have is that we have been collected data from universities for the past four years and it’s worse that almost all other industries that we have studied.
“We think this is very timely. Universities are very responsive to league tables.”
Asked why the survey focused heavily on staff perceptions of senior management, with little focus on the impact of line managers, other staff, regulators, partners and/or students, Professor Dollard said the survey was focused on understanding the highest levels of protection, and it was not intended to be a comprehensive assessment of risk at all levels of the sector.
The team would share some more detailed data with individual institutions and unions, Professor Dollard said.
When asked about concerns that results may be skewed because people feeling dissatisfied may be more likely to fill out the survey, Professor Dollard said the team was hoping to hear from as many people in the sector as possible, to get a comprehensive result.
“We are trying to get the Vice-Chancellors to send it out to staff. We want everyone to answer it as honestly as they can. We have a question in there asking whether respondents belong to a union or not, because we want to know if there is a variation in perception between those that are union members and those that are not.”
“It only takes six minutes at the most to fill out the survey – it’s a low impact on the time of the staff who fill it out, but potentially a high impact for the sector.”